Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday June 14, 2011 @09:01PM
from the flipping-perlburgers dept.

jcasman writes "Some entrepreneurs wait a lifetime to experience the thrill of selling their startup companies. Daniil Kulchenko, a Seattle area high school student, accomplished that milestone at the age of 15. Kulchenko today announced that he's sold his startup, a cloud-based computing company known as Phenona, to Vancouver, B.C.-based ActiveState in a deal of undisclosed size."

I didn't need to read the article to assume that was the case. You hear a lot of stories every year about genius children who discover something fantastic or start a company or a major project that makes them wealthy and/or famous and their parents are almost exclusively professionals in the same field that their child is "excelling" in. The lesson being that it's not some independent kid coming up from scratch doing something amazing - it's almost always a kid (probably smart and ambitious, still) who had a parent get them into the stuff in the first place, then support them, guide them, advise them, help them make contacts, help them find resources, have their friends and colleagues chip in where needed.

It's not to diminish the success, but to point out that the reason THIS kid did this and YOUR kid won't is that YOU probably don't have all the resources and connections to give your child from early on to guide them into this.

Oh please. Most children of scientists/etc couldn't be less interested in what their parents do (until later years). If the kid's story is diminished then it's only because his father outshines him. One of the rare examples of "proper parenting".

However, without a parent in the field with the connections and resources, any interest such a child might show in a particular field would probably not be very fruitful. Take this same kid and take his dad out of the picture, make his mom a nurse or waitress, and put them in a low end two bedroom apartment and this kid's great accomplishment becomes graduating highschool and possibly attending community college against the odds.

It's not just that, people with rich parents rarely ever have to do a large number of chores around the house and whatnot, so they have a lot more spare time. Most rich kids squander that gift, this kid didn't. Man what I wouldn't give to have all that time I spent mowing the lawn, washing dishes, cleaning, doing laundry etc. back when I was a kid.....

It's not just that, people with rich parents rarely ever have to do a large number of chores around the house and whatnot, so they have a lot more spare time. Most rich kids squander that gift, this kid didn't. Man what I wouldn't give to have all that time I spent mowing the lawn, washing dishes, cleaning, doing laundry etc. back when I was a kid.....

You'd only have spent the time enjoying yourself, which is no great life lesson to teach a child. You were better off learning that adult life is a combination of boredom and pointless hard work at a young age.

It's not just that, people with rich parents rarely ever have to do a large number of chores around the house and whatnot, so they have a lot more spare time. Most rich kids squander that gift, this kid didn't. Man what I wouldn't give to have all that time I spent mowing the lawn, washing dishes, cleaning, doing laundry etc. back when I was a kid.....

You'd only have spent the time enjoying yourself, which is no great life lesson to teach a child. You were better off learning that adult life is a combination of boredom and pointless hard work at a young age.

I bet you're just loads of fun at parties. Not that I disagree with you, exactly

Who is more likely to get into a tech field early on, have the support and guidance from an adult, early on, and have the encouragement, connections, and resources so early on? The kid with the dad who is a robotics and AI scientist or the kid with the dad who works at a concessions stand at a ballpark?

AC's point is about the foolish equation of "researcher at University of Washington" with "rich engineer, silver spoon and business connections". A university researcher is not necessarily an engineer, and both research and engineering positions are well within the bounds of middle class in the western world. The kid may well have advantages in the tech field over the concession-stand dad, but a silver spoon is not one of them.

Born into being fed with silverspoon, using rich engineer Daddy's academic resources, name, and business connections... is not at all impressive.

Citation please. The fantasy you built typically condems teens to failure. They get money, cars, and cheerleader girlfriends so why do anything else? So... If any of your fantasy of why you haven't done better in life actually turns out to be true then I have even more respect for the kid. From the TFA he was a freelance Linux admin at 11 so he got hooked young, has a knack, and stuck with it.

I don't think we can make any assumptions about the wealth of the family, but you absolutely can't dismiss the fact that if his dad had a completely different career or wasn't even in the picture, he would not have gone beyond the "expressed an interested in" stage. You see, expressing an interest in something at a very early age doesn't magically provide you with a computer, educational resources for using it and programming with it, internet access, encouragement, guidance, advice, resources, connections

Don't feel like you need to defend yourself against any of the trolling comments here (and in fact you're better off ignoring them). You're a talented young man - and anyone of any importance in the world is going to recognize that immediately. This guy is not important.

Congrats on your success. If you care to share how much $$ you made on the sale, we would all be interested.:)

I don't think any rational person is discounting the accomplishment and the awesomeness, but let's not dismiss the endless stories we've seen over the years about "ten year old does awesome thing in technology" and "fifteen year old makes scientific discovery" and "seventeen year old founds awesome tech darling" where their parents are always established in the same field themselves. Where are all the stories of these kids from single parent families who live in the part of town where you don't go out at ni

I'm not surprised that a smart kid can do what you do especially now given the vast resources available on the Internet. There's just so much a person can learn online nowadays, the issue is more of what you want to learn and spend your time on.

When you get older you might find you have less energy and time to spend on your interests, and stuff might just not feel as interesting and exciting- you might get a bit jaded. The first time you eat ice cream is often much better than the 100th time, even though the ice cream has not changed.

So before that happens, have fun, stay motivated, keep doing stuff and keep finding cool stuff to do! And you might find you never get old, just older;).

p.s. try not to spend too much time on Slashdot - it can be a big time-sink...

Apparently that's what it looks like... except it's a 15 year old who dun it. FTFA:

Your app is launched into a securely partitioned environment on a cloud server. All CPAN modules required by your app are installed. MySQL and memcached are automatically set up, and connection information is exposed to you via environmental variables. In front of your app sits a Varnish caching server, quietly improving the performance of your app.

Cloning a VM is amazing? The real magic(tm) is in creating the VM the first time. (something my coworkers learned recently when I made them build the windows vms for virtual center, domain controller, etc.)

He appears to have written some scripts / programs to automate a highly complex process. System admins have been doing that for as long as computers have existed. He's managed to get someone to buy his creation -- for an undisclosed amount that isn't likely to be the billions the/. crowd is making it

Cloning a VM is amazing? The real magic(tm) is in creating the VM the first time.

You obviously don't understand PaaS [wikipedia.org]. The developer who deploys *never touches* a VM. It's created on the fly, not cloned, with load-balancing, dependencies and caching all figured out for you.

the kid is 15. Another few years and this wouldnt have been newsworthy. It's good to see young people taking initiative though. Not only did he have the business sense to do something, but it was obviously something someone else thought could be worthwhile enough to purchase. kudos indeed. I certainly wasnt thinking like this 8 years ago.

I truly do not understand where you are coming from when you feel the need to repeat this same comment in 3 different places. What is your beef with this kid? What is your point, exactly?

As others have mentioned, you come across as being extremely jealous. And for an adult to make jealous comments about a teenager - well what can I say except that those comments reflect far worse on the adult, and are generally indicative of an adult who has had issues adapting to life as a grown-up.

Right, the only response acceptable is "wow, amazing". It's certainly not worth pushing the point that the kid next door to you with less accomplished and connected parents won't have any such opportunity.

Like this kid, I found an opportunity and exploited it at a young age, which I was able to make into a great and very fulfilling career. I didn't have the parents aspect, but I did benefit from rare fortunate circumstances that do not fall most teenagers who *do* have an interest or even a passion in somet

Is what he said correct? Is/was his dad a robotics and AI researcher (looking at the article, that seems to be true)? Instantly assuming that he is jealous because he mentioned that (or because he gave criticism) doesn't make sense to me. I don't know whether he is jealous or not, and that's precisely why I wouldn't reach a conclusion about whether he is jealous or not. I have seen quite a few people use the "you're just jealous" argument whenever someone mentions something that could downplay a well-off pe

Sorry, but unless you're a mind reader, I don't see how you can state such a thing as an absolute fact. Again, you're just assuming that the only reason he would post that (a fact, no less) is because he is jealous. How do you know there aren't other reasons? Because you can't think of them? That doesn't mean that they don't exist. In this instance, he may have just wanted to inform readers about the kid's father's career and does not actually care about the kid's success. Who knows?

No offense, but the only thing stopping you is the belief that you can accomplish your goal.

Follow your dreams if you have them, don't wait, life it way too short.

I didn't wait, because my family wasn't exactly rollin' in the cash and at 13 I mowed lawns, and at 14 I did the early am paper route thing and hated it, so I started 2 businesses while still in middle school (only to be shut down by my school administration through a ban on my products), and in high school I started another business that I ran fo

Actually, selling it is probably a wise move whether arrived at on his own or by counsel of those advising him. Better to reap what benefits you can, now, rather than try and balance it and all of high school and hope that it all "just works out". Instead, he seems to have parlayed not only a short term success and reward, but an opportunity at ActiveState, which could be more valuable to him in the long run. Especially as they appear considerate of his age and obligations.

If you go to the site for the product, its very clear that its no 15 year olds company.

At best, he took some of daddies money and told some other people to make some shit and his parents called it a company, his idea possibly developed to what it is now by some actual developer hired to work for him.

Whats likely is that his parents and he worked on this together, and the parents are calling it 'his company', but it would never exist without them.

The website gives it away: [phenona.com] "I was working on a client project back in 2009, a Craigslist aggregator which I wrote in Catalyst, and spent a large portion of my vacation in Mexico trying to get it to work on the client's IIS server. It was a nightmare. At the time, I'd already heard of Heroku, a simple deployment solution for Ruby-based web apps, and I thought: why Ruby and not us? I spent weeks researching Heroku, and the work on Phenona had begun."

Actually, yes, it does sound realistic. When I was 14, I did some VB6 coding for money (well okay, not in Mexico). And while I didn't spend my entire vacation on it, I did spend most of one vacation - including my 15th birthday that happened to be at the time - writing my own BASIC compiler, for the fun of it.

No, it doesn't make one a genius. All it really takes is some innate curiosity and ability to stick to a specific goal for long enough, some aptitude for coding, parents who encourage it or at least do

Most likely some VC has been cheated by the "cloud" related buzzwords into this fad. The problem is that anything involving words like "interner server", "cloud", "Ruby on rails" is too flashi, incomprehensible, uber-smart, and, exactly that irresistible thing, they are in the market for.. (driven by some wet dreams of bumping into Google 2.0)

Imagine this. You've spent hours and hours coding the perfect Catalyst (or Dancer, or Mojolicious, or, hell, CGI) application. You're using DBIx::Class with a MySQL database to store user info, and memcached in front of it for performance.

You now want it out there, for the world to see and use. Here's a deployment scenario for a good web application:

1. Get a server. These days you might go for some slow shared hosting, or maybe a VPS, or perhaps EC2 or Rackspace.
2. Install Perl and spend a few hours installing all the dependencies of your project. (Ever installed Catalyst before? It's not for the faint of heart.)
3. Install and configure MySQL, set up users, permissions, databases.
4. Install and configure memcached.
5. Set up a backup, redundancy, and failover solution. What would happen if your server went down, data was lost? You'd need to set up more than one server, do failover between them, and do regular backups to protect valuable user data.
6. Set up cron jobs and background worker processes to work on long-running jobs.
7. Set up a caching server, such as Varnish or Squid, to improve performance of your app.
8. Secure your server, open the necessary ports for outside access.
9. Deploy and test your code.
10. Manage system updates, app monitoring, and downtime yourself.

Hours, days, even weeks of time. Potentially hundreds of dollars. Or you could type this:

When was the last time you looked at what's new in Perl or read "Modern Perl"? No, didn't think so. Throw-away attitudes are easy. Have you any idea what's in the perldeltas for the last 2 releases? No, thought not. Done anything with Moose? I rest my case.

Perl remains extremely powerful and one of the most versatile languages, even today. That said, the heavily trafficked and fairly complex 15,000 lines of code service I wrote when I was a kid (well, before drinking age) from scratch in 1998-2000 that powered everything up until 2011 is probably not the choice I would make if I were doing it all over again, today. At least, not if I were still starting out as I mostly was, back then. I made the mistake of choosing it as my first real language that I really d

His parents can be worried now, becasue all of the kids with monis in my school had problems with drugs, smokes, games and alk. I hope someone will manage his monis before he can understand how success corrupts the mind.

On the positive side. It is cool that someone takes a 15 year old boy seriously enough to buy a company from him.

How can this be? Does he have a bachelor's degree? I've been told university is a noble institution, not profit-based at all, that teaches essential things that can only be taught in a a classroom with a bearded windbag sleeping at the front?

It is incredibly hard to give meaningful names to things. What would you have us do? "Oh, look, I've created 'PHP Web Framework #340203411: More jQuery'" That said, some of the names aren't terrible. That said, I think Varnish and Squid are both good names for what they are.

I've always found that definition to be somewhat recursive. How is Opportunity not based at least in part on Luck? Maybe there are very rare exceptions where a truly extraordinary individual 100% created his own opportunities, but I doubt it.

I was just going to post something about that (contracts). Did he have to get a note from his parents?
It could be that someone over 18, the parents perhaps, were the C-level execs and he was just the majority shareholder.

I was working on a client project back in 2009, a Craigslist aggregator which I wrote in Catalyst, and spent a large portion of my vacation in Mexico trying to get it to work on the client's IIS server. It was a nightmare....

That would have made him about 13 at the time. What company employ's a 13 year old to work on expensive company servers. Regardless if he is a prodigy.

I had the same feeling when I read this. I just don't understand how any kid could even find the time to become so fluent in so many technical areas. Unless of course his parents force fed him source code since he was an infant; which is probably the case if he is a real person. But this whole thing does seem like it's some sort of advertising conspiracy for ActiveState and their new program (which they probably developed). I checked out the kids twitter account and it does seem like it's written by a 35 ye

Meet Daniil Kulchenko. He was an HTML programmer at age six. He was a freelance Linux systems administrator at 11. And at 15, he founded his first business: Phenona, a platform-as-a-service for building and hosting Perl applications.

And that's the same exact pic of "Anonymous Male Teen" that's on/.'s summarized article, which is also the same as the guy's twitter account. And this is basically the same exact article, you've provided no additional information. I still think this kid doesn't exist.

The source code is notoriously complex, a mark of the seriously ingenious Paul Kulchenko who created SOAP:Lite. As a result baffles most inexperienced Perl programmers, and indeed sends many of them running in shear terror. I myself am given the highest respect in my office for signing up to maintain the module for this fact alone - I work with some of the brightest and most experienced Perl programmers in the industry and they all look at SOAP::Lite in awe. And not the "good" kind of awe, the kind of awe that gives people a healthy, but fearful respect.

Yeah, the El Reg interview was an audio interview, I was also on KOMO News Radio, local here in Seattle.
What else do you need, some photos off my Facebook profile?;)

Not even a facebook profile would completely convince me. But the audio file, and that you were on a radio station that I listen to often(I'm actually from Seattle too), is proof enough. Usually I'm just skeptical to be skeptical and it only allows me to be more confident about the conclusions I draw. I'm sorry I have to take such an incredulous stance, but it's in my nature.

Congrats on achieving so much so early in life though. I'm sure we'll all hear about a lot more of your achievements down the road.

Since when does the state of Washington put an age limit on who can incorporate, form an LLC, or just run a plain old sole proprietorship? ActiveState bears some risk that he will choose to void the sale before he turns 18. Apparently that is a risk they are willing to take.

This is kinda neat. I know it's a copy of what Heroku and co have already done, and I've no love of PERL, but give the guy some cred. 15 year old or no, if this all works as stated it's a nice piece of hackery.

Yea, its decentralized... except the trackers and the search sites aren't, which for all practical purposes are required for bittorrent to be useful in a general purpose sense.

Its funny when people such as yourself run on about decentralized apps without realizing there isn't a 'decentralized' app on the Internet that doesn't depend directly on indirectly on something that is centralized and authoritative in order to thwart potential Bad Guys(tm).